Structural Violence, the Cult of Power, and Peace Studies: Relevance for the 21st Century
Harry Targ
(A version of this article was originally presented at a Symposium in Honor of Berenice A.
Carroll called “Pen and Protest: Intellect and Action”, November 17, 2007)
Dominant Paradigms and the Study of the Cold War
If we think back to the time when “The Cult of Power” was written dominant paradigms in international relations, political science, and history continued to reify power as the central concept driving political analysis. The world was understood as one dominated by two superpowers overseeing two competing power blocs. The bipolar world was a particular variant of the state system that was created in the seventeenth century. The ultimate units of analysis were separate and distinct nation-states. Since a few were more powerful than all others, which was always the case, international relations became the study of powerful states. The arms race of the post-World War II period concerned some analysts of international relations, so they fashioned peace research that was committed to conflict management or resolution among the big powers.
This scholarly lens on the world seemed increasingly divorced from political reality. The dreams of human liberation that came with the rapid decolonization of the African continent were being derailed as what Kwame Nkrumah called “neo-colonialism” replaced formal colonialism. Gaps between rich and poor peoples and nations began their steep climb. Covert operations, military coups, big power interventions in poor countries increased. Wars ensued against peoples in South and East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. And multinational corporations were spreading their operations all across the globe, initiating the first great wave of outsourcings of production and jobs. For many Americans and Asians, the most wrenching experience of all these manifestations of global disarray was the Vietnam War.
In this historical context, radical peace researchers began to argue that our understanding of these phenomena required a significant paradigm shift. If we wanted to understand the world in order to change it we needed to break out of the state centric, great powers, conflict management conception of international relations. We needed to develop theories and prescriptions that helped us understand the world we lived in so that we could work on the reduction of the enormous gaps between human potential and human actuality; and, therefore, human violence.
These peace researchers called structural violence, the difference between how humanity could live, secure in economic and social justice, versus how most people live. They asked questions about the structures and processes that prohibited the full realization of human possibility. Peace researchers also saw an inextricable connection between direct violence, or killing which was the more traditional subject of peace research, and structural violence, which involved the institutionalization of human misery.
Further, they hypothesized that there were connections between imperialism, dominance and dependence, the workings of capitalism, patriarchy, institutionalized racism, social and economic injustice and both direct and structural violence.
More specifically, radical peace researchers began to see that both direct and structural violence were the resultants of a global political/economic/ and cultural system in which Centers of Power within and between countries controlled and exploited Periphery countries and people. A system of imperialism existed whereby ruling classes in core countries collaborated with ruling classes in peripheral countries to exploit masses of people. This was a system that had its roots in the rise of capitalism out of feudalism. It was a system of imperial rule. It was a system of patriarchy. It was a system of institutionalized racism. And wars were the result of struggles for imperial control and domination. Radical peace researchers borrowed ideas from dependency theory and grafted them onto traditional theories of imperialism to offer an alternative paradigm to the state-centric, power driven model that dominated the academy and political punditry.
The Cult of Power
Berenice Carroll added to the emerging paradigm shift in her article “Peace Research: The Cult of Power,” by deconstructing the use of “power” as the concept central to the traditional paradigm. Also she alerted peace researchers to the implicit acceptance in their work of the cult of power. Perhaps most importantly, Carroll offered an alternative conception of power that would radically redirect study in a way to link the “pen to protest.”
In her seminal article, Professor Carroll pointed out that virtually all theories of international relations began with a conception of power. And the power variable had seeped into the public consciousness of world affairs as well. In its contemporary usage “power” referred to control, dominance, and the ability to shape the consciousness and behavior of others; individuals, groups, and/or nations.
The dean of international relations study in those days was Hans Morgenthau, who wrote the classic international relations text, Politics Among Nations, which went through eleven editions from its first imprint in 1949 until the 1970s. Morgenthau said that power was central to human affairs: ‘Power is the control of the minds and actions of others,” and “international politics like all politics involves the struggle for power.”
Carroll pointed out that theorists sometimes defined power as the ability to dominate. Sometimes they defined power as the instrumentalities of control (such as military capabilities). Sometimes they defined power as a perceived status ordering of nations. But what was central here was control and domination. And as long as the ability to control and dominate were unequally distributed only those with the greatest power were worthy of attention.
Berenice reminded us that there used to be definitions of power in public discourse that emphasized liberation rather than control. These older definitions included words like strength, competence, rigor, energy, empowerment, the ability to actualize. To quote Berenice, “Thus it appears that the currently predominant understanding of power as control and dominance is a development of recent decades. The more traditional meaning centered on the idea of ability and strength.”
To illustrate her point in a way relevant to both peace and (I would add) feminist theory, Carroll offered a vivid quote from a distinguished scholar of that time Karl Deutsch who wrote:
What implications for peace and feminist theory did Professor Carroll suggest should be deduced from this “cult of power?” First, scholar/activists needed to reject the notion that power represents dominance. Second, scholar/activists needed to broaden their research lens from focusing on so-called powerful institutions, like the nation-state, or decision-making elites and begin to examine the entirety of the social/political/ and cultural terrain. Third, scholar/activists needed to utilize the older conception of power as actualization, competence, assertion of rights; in other words a vision of power that understands that historical change is a complicated affair involving masses of people not ordinarily studied or valued by contemporary scholarship. Fourth, scholar/activists needed to reject a frame on reality, accepted even by the more radical, that presents history as the struggle between the powerful and victims and which portrays people as impotent to assert their rights and prerogatives. (Discourse in the academy is particularly good at framing political reality such that people are powerless, or ignorant, or lacking in resources to assert themselves, or are in the end the cause of their own victimhood. This projection is particularly strong among those who never set foot off the college campus as they pontificate about the behavior of the people).
Summing this up, Professor Carroll writes”
“…one of the most pernicious effects of the cultist conceptions of power is that it has built up a strong association between the lack of power in the sense of dominance and powerlessness in the sense of helplessness…To break out of this mold what seems most urgently needed is to restore to public consciousness and to the consciousness of scholars the idea of power as competence; to develop that idea more fully by differentiating the kinds of energy, ability, and strength which it may imply and, in particular, to seek to study powers of the allegedly powerless-the kinds of competence and potentialities for autonomous action which are available to those who do not have the power of dominance….”
Where are we today?
It seems to me that Professor Carroll’s argument is as critical to us as peace researchers, feminists, worker rights activists, anti-racist activists, and, indeed, all social justice activists today. While the academic world is perhaps more complicated today and there are manifestations of a theoretical diversity that may not have been as developed in 1972, I would argue that the main lines of “the cult of power” argument still hold. Power is reified in our academic disciplines. Top-down models of human experience still predominate in the social sciences and humanities. For most fields non-elites remain voiceless and invisible. At best they are presented as victims, not actors on the world stage. Academic paradigms, whether consciously conceived or not, therefore project a profound pessimism about social change and human possibility. And, for some scholars, the victims become the cause of their own victimhood. The most well meaning of us as scholars and concerned citizens present a view of the world that demeans and discourages the vast majority of humankind.
Where do we go from here?
1)We need in our scholarship to emphasize the centrality of workers, women, people of color, and all so-called marginalized people as shapers of history, or at least to recognize their role in creating history.
2)We need to engage in research projects that might help the voiceless gain a voice, the powerless to increasingly and more effectively shape their own destiny, and individuals, groups, and classes gain self-confidence and strength in their social projects.
3)We need to extend our scholarship to the study and celebration of those who have chosen the path to empowerment and the evaluation of their relative successes and failures. This would not be an exercise in romanticism but rather an exercise in developing a more sophisticated understanding of history and change.
4)We need to build our theories and our research skills through active engagement in the process of social change. Theoretical validation comes from engagement not withdrawal.
5)We need to relate models of empowerment to all sectors of society. We cannot embrace the issue of competence, strength, and self-actualization for one constituency and use traditional models of domination to try to understand other parallel constituencies. Here is where understanding the connections between class, race, and gender play a particularly important role.
Berenice Carroll ended her ground-breaking article by quoting Hannah Arendt:
“It is only after one eliminates this disastrous reduction of public affairs to the business of domination, that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear or rather reappear in their authentic diversity.”
